Just a jump to the left

I've been knitting a really lovely pair of socks, my second pair of Artichoke Socks, in Madelinetosh Tosh Sock (colorway "Kale", or as I like to think of it, "KALE!!!"). I've touted the charms of this pattern before: it's pretty, easily memorizable, charmingly symmetrical, and shows off a lightly variegated yarn like nobody's business.

Also, being the giant dork about vegetables that I am, it pleases me to no end to knit "Artichoke" socks in a colorway called "Kale".

And while I thoroughly enjoyed the last pair I knit in Shibui Sock, it's even more pleasing in Madelinetosh, which somehow even in the dark smoky purple-grey Kale colorway glows with a magical inner light possessed by no other 100% wool yarn I've ever seen.



I swear there's some silk snuck into the mix. Or some obscure alchemy on the part of the dyer. Whatever it is, it's wonderful and I want many, many more balls of the stuff.

The one problem I've had is that the pattern is kind of a pain to work on DPNs. Each row starts with a Purl 1, which always looks bad at the beginning of a needle (if you're me). After that P1, there's a few columns of ribbing, then the symmetrical front of leg pattern, then a few more columns of ribbing, then the same symmetrical branching leaves pattern on the back of the leg. Using 4 DPNs, the logical way to divide the pattern among 3 needles seemed to be:

Needle 1: purl 1, ribbing, first half of leaf pattern
Needle 2 (1/2 of stitches): second half of leaf pattern, ribbing, first half of leaf pattern
Needle 3: ribbing, second half of leaf pattern, ribbing

For whatever reason, I could not grasp this set-up. I kept bungling the second half of the leaf pattern because logically (to me) needle 2 is the start of the front of the leg and should always start with the FIRST half of a repeat. I do realize this is not actually true, but my brain and hands were quite insistent that this was absolutely the case and kept sneaking in a K2TOG where there should have been a SSK.

There was a really obvious solution to this: I scootched things a bit to the left, so that the entire front of the leg was on needle 2.

And just like that, with a wee shift, suddenly the pattern flowed for me in a way that it absolutely hadn't before.



In keeping with my knitting, my job search has taken a jump to the left as well. For most of my career, I've worked in the corporate world: a corporate law firm, a multi-national consulting company, a fine publisher of cooking magazines and cookbooks, back to the multi-national consulting company, etc.

In keeping with this corporate background, I'd applied for a bunch of jobs in my field: enterprise-level HR information systems analysis. And I'd gotten exactly 0 bites. Not one damn phone call.

This was disheartening.

Until I thought about it differently - I never really felt like the corporate world was a good fit for me. I went to library school specifically because I was interested in rabble-rousing activist public library work. Helping corporations make more money for the sake of making money never seemed like a great way to spend one's life.

And suddenly, there it was: I should be applying at nonprofits. And just like that, everything shifted - every job I've applied for I've gotten an interview. Several interviews in most cases.

I think maybe the universe is trying to tell me something...